He quit speaking and in the silence I could hear the ticking of a clock, faint and far off, but I couldn't see the clock and I resisted the temptation to turn my head to see if I could find it. For I had the feeling that if I turned my head, if I stirred at all, I'd break something that lay within the room. As if I stood in a crowded china shop, where all the pieces were precarious and tilted, fearing to move, for if one piece were dislodged, all of them would come crashing down.
"What would you have done?" asked Sherwood.
"I'd have used anything I had," I said.
"That's what I did," said Sherwood. "I was desperate. There was the business, this house, Nancy, the family name — all of it at stake. I took all of those ideas and I wrote them down and I called in my engineers and draughtsmen and production people and we got to work. I got the credit for it all, of course. There was nothing I could do about it. I couldn't tell them I wasn't the one who'd dreamed up all those things. And you know, strange as it may sound, that's the hardest part of all. That I have to go on taking credit for all those things I didn't do."
"So that is that," I said. "The family business saved and everything is fine. If I were you, I wouldn't let a guilt complex bother me too much."
"But it didn't stop," he said. "If it had, I'd have forgotten it. If there'd just been this single spurt of help to save the company, it might have been all right. But it kept right on. As if there might be two of me, the real, apparent Gerald Sherwood, the one sitting at this desk, and another one who did the thinking for me.
"The ideas kept on coming and some of them made a lot of sense and some made no sense at all. Some of them, I tell you, were out of this world, literally out of this world. They had no point of reference, they didn't seem to square with any situation. And while one could sense that they had potential, while there was a feeling of great importance in the very texture of them, they were entirely useless.
"And it was not only the ideas; it was knowledge also. Bits and bursts of knowledge. Knowledge about things in which I had no interest, things I had never thought of. Knowledge about certain things I'm certain no man knows about. As if someone took a handful of fragmented knowledge, a sort of grab-bag, junk-heap pile of knowledge and dumped it in my brain." He reached out for the bottle and filled his glass. He gestured at me with the bottle neck and I held out my glass. He filled it to the brim.
"Drink up," he said. "You got me started and now you hear me out. Tomorrow morning I'll ask myself why I told you all of this. But tonight it seems all right."
"If you don't want to tell me. If it seems that I am prying…"
He waved a hand at me. "All right," he said, "if you don't want to hear it. Pick up your fifteen hundred."
I shook my head. "Not yet. Not until I know how come you're giving it to me."
"It's not my money. I'm just acting as an agent."
"For this other man? For this other you?"
He nodded. "That's right," he said. "I wonder how you guessed." I gestured at the phone without a dial.
He grimaced. "I've never used the thing," he said. "Until you told me about the one you found waiting in your office, I never knew anyone who had. I make them by the hundreds…"
"You make them!"
"Yes, of course I do. Not for myself. For this second self. Although," he said, leaning across the desk and lowering his voice to a confidential tone, "I'm beginning to suspect it's not a second self."
"What do you think it is?"
He leaned slowly back in the chair. "Damned if I know," he said. "There was a time I thought about it and wondered at it and worried over it, but there was no way of knowing. I just don't bother any more. I tell myself there may be others like me. Maybe I am not alone — at least, it's good to think so."
"But the phone?" I asked.
"I designed the thing," he said. "Or perhaps this other person, if it is a person, did. I found it in my mind and I put it down on paper. And I did this, mind you, without knowing what it was or what it was supposed to do. I knew it was a phone of some sort, naturally. But I couldn't, for the life of me, see how it could work. And neither could any of the others who put it into production at the plant. By all the rules of reason, the damn thing shouldn't work."
"But you said there were a lot of other things that seemed to have no purpose."
"A lot of them," he said, "but with them I never drew a blueprint, I never tried to make them. But the phone, if that is what you want to call it, was a different proposition. I knew that I should make them and how many might be needed and what to do with them."
"What did you do with them?
"I shipped them to an outfit in New Jersey." It was utterly insane.
"Let me get this straight," I pleaded. "You found the blueprints in your head and you knew you should make these phones and that you should send them to some place in New Jersey. And you did it without question?"
"Oh, certainly with question. I felt somewhat like a fool. But consider this: this second self, this auxiliary brain, this contact with something else had never let me down. It had saved my business, it had provided good advice, it had never failed me. You can't turn your back on something that has played good fairy to you."
"I think I see," I said.
"Of course you do," he told me. "A gambler rides his luck. An investor plays his hunches. And neither luck nor hunch are as solid and consistent as this thing I have." He reached out and picked up the dialless phone and looked at it, then set it down again. "I brought this one home," he said, "and put it on the desk. All these years I've waited for a call, but it never came."
"With you," I told him, "there is no need of any phone."
"You think that's it?" he asked.
"I'm sure of it."
"I suppose it is," he said. "At times it's confusing."
"This Jersey firm?" I asked. "You corresponded with them?"
He shook his head. "Not a line. I just shipped the phones."
"There was no acknowledgement?"
"No acknowledgement," he said. "No payment. I expected none. When you do business with yourself…"
"Yourself! You mean this second self runs that New Jersey firm?"
"I don't know," he said. "Christ, I don't know anything. I've lived with it all these years and I tried to understand, but I never understood." And now his face was haunted and I felt sorry for him.
He must have noticed that I felt sorry for him. He laughed and said.
"Don't let me get you down. I can take it. I can take anything. You must not forget that I've been well paid. Tell me about yourself. You're in real estate."
I nodded. "And insurance."
"And you couldn't pay your phone bill."
"Don't waste sympathy on me," I said. "I'll get along somehow."
"Funny thing about the kids," he said. "Not many of them stay here. Not much to keep them here, I guess."
"Not very much," I said.
"Nancy is just home from Europe," he told me. "I'm glad to have her home. It got lonesome here with no one. I haven't seen much of her lately. College and then a fling at social work and then the trip to Europe. But she tells me now that she plans to stay a while. She wants to do some writing."
"She should be good at it," I said. "She got good marks in composition when we were in high school."
"She has the writing bug," he said. "Had half a dozen things published in, I guess you call them little magazines. The ones that come out quarterly and pay you nothing for your work except half a dozen copies. I'd never heard of them before. I read the articles she wrote, but I have no eye for writing. I don't know if it's good or bad. Although I suppose it has to have a certain competence to have been accepted. But if writing keeps her here with me, I'll be satisfied."